What It Takes to Make a Kinder, Gentler Video Game

In 2003, Ken Hall was art director for Realtime Words, the large video game developer that made APB, which later became APB Reloaded, a highly popular free-to-play video game. At the time, free-to-play games, where players get most of the game for free but must pay to unlock the rest of the game or improve their performance, were still in their infancy. The strategy was aimed at hooking the casual gamer, but Hall had a rude awakening, perhaps like Dr. Frankenstein might have felt when his company received data showing gamers in South Korea were playing as much as 35 hours a week, and that was on top of their day jobs. He thought, what kind of monster have we created? "We were inadvertently creating compulsive gameplay loops," Hall says.